


It's Too Hard to Say Out Loud

by failsafe



Category: Jurassic Park (1993), Jurassic Park (Movies)
Genre: Admiration, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bonding, Break Up, Coping, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hope, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Pining, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 05:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11479251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: Some things pass between them silently.





	It's Too Hard to Say Out Loud

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



“We're never going back to normal, are we?” Ellie asks it so quietly that it barely sounds like her voice. She asks it so quietly that it almost surprises her that she has spoken it aloud. She starts a little when it brings about a response, even from the man she knows is still beside her in their bed.

“I don't know,” Alan replies thoughtfully after what seems like a careful, reverent silence. She spares a glance for him, only to find his eyes fixed on the ceiling. He seems to respond to her glance anyway, subconsciously. His arm moves to cradle the back of his own head, as if he didn't have a pillow. It stretches the sleeve of his white, generic, clean, new t-shirt that had come out of a back with two more just like it.

“That's it?” she asks. She manages a chuckle to punctuate it. It makes it sound like banter more than worry. For now, he is still beside her. For now, this is their bed. But it is in a hotel room paid for with blood money and guilt, on the tab of one John Hammond, a man whom she feels equal sorrow for and hatred toward, here in the dark. She tries not to feel anything at all for him here. Instead, she tries to reach out and hold onto what she does feel for Alan, because it is still there, even if only for now.

“That... That's it,” Alan replies, defeated into a matching chuckle. It lingers longer for him, and he doesn't seem to realize quite what he has said. Ellie doesn't know if he means it the way she fears they do. If he does, she digs her metaphorical heels in and decides that it can, it will, it must wait until morning. She smiles a sad smile that she tries to wish into a different state, a different meaning.

“Then what happens next?” she asks, forcing hope into her tone.

“I don't know,” Alan replies, again, but when she glances over at him and their eyes meet, briefly, he quickly scrambles for more words. It would seem to be an evasive maneuver, but at the same time it feels like he is doing it because he still feels something, too. The warmth that is still there between them, at least for now. His skin is still as sun-tanned as ever, but the stretch of muscle beneath it looks tired. He had lost something on the island, too, and she hasn't had the chance to ask for a detailed list yet. She hasn't given him hers. She wonders if they ever will. “I was telling the kids, back there in the Park, that... my kind was going to go extinct. That... I'd just have to evolve, too,” he remarks. He looks back up at the ceiling, as if he expects to find stars there, only to find plain, white plaster.

“Maybe that isn't true,” Ellie offers, because he had offered her something. “That place is going to stay blockaded forever, and it's going to pay an army of lawyers' salaries for years to sort out the mess they made.”

Alan sighs and shrugs as best he can from lying on his back. He adjusts his arm again and scrubs his hand across his forehead.

“I suppose,” he allows. “It's just that it's Pandora's box, Ellie. Now that it's open...”

And there's the answer to her question. No, they are never going back to normal again. She thinks it's funny, a few minutes later, when she has squirmed closer to him in an assuming, unassuming posture to share his warmth, his side against hers, that he chose to phrase it that way. Pandora's box. For a while, their closeness and familiar intimacy is nothing more than safety, shelter in one another from anything outside. Then, she kisses his cheek. She doesn't want that to be the way it ends, the way anything ends, though, with such a formal kind of saying goodbye.

If he senses what her worries are, she cannot tell it. There is something she would call akin to innocence in his eyes when he meets hers, almost surprised. He smiles, just barely, and lifts his head enough to respond to her, to brush the tip of his nose where he can find her cheek. Familiar, soft contact between their lips follows soon after, and then she stops trying to pretend she has accepted defeat, accepted loneliness and death and the end, because when she had seen him standing there, on that hill, it had taken every ounce of her strength to keep moving. Her heart pounding, body bleeding, muscles aching, she had insisted to herself – _'Run.'_ And she had not run to him for nothing. Clinging to him now, in what ways she can, in every way she can, is still something like that – aching and insistent and the furthest thing from indifferent. It was funny, that he'd brought it up – Pandora's box. The way she remembered that story, the thing that still got caught inside was _hope_. 

 

* * *

He really didn't know how he had let them get away without saying much of anything. Of course, that wasn't entirely true, but after all of that on the island it seemed like the rush to get home, to spread them back to the winds from which they had come, was of the utmost importance to Hammond. He was probably motivated by guilt, pity, compassion, and a fear of greater financial loss than he had already incurred, in that order, or in the reverse. Either way, it had been a little bit of a whirlwind for Ian Malcolm, and it didn't really sit well with him. 

There were legal demands to be met on either side, and InGen was in absolutely no hurry to dole out compensation. Malcolm wasn't so much sure that he wanted compensation – though he wouldn't say no to money – but he had started to develop a policy of personal insurance. In his time alone in his office, he began to keep notes. Parts of him, a lot of the time, laughed everything off and tried to carry on like normal, but it pressed on his mind enough that he had started doing it. 

In a little, leather-bound tome he had purchased in a gift shop for its fancy, dramatic inlay and dark color, he began to write down his memories of the events that had transpired to lead him to Isla Nublar. Then, he wrote about the events as they had happened on the ground. He did his best to be honest. He tried to write down conversations in a short-hand that was essentially faithful to his memory, keeping embellishment to a minimum for now. Depending on what he used the notes for, embellishment and elaboration would certainly come later. It was a strange thing how his recollection of an absolutely hellish vacation to an island filled with dinosaurs had a cast filled with so many  _people_ . 

One afternoon, in a golden hour wasted on his pursuit, Ian has a sudden fit or compulsion of inspiration while leaning over a mess on his desk over the little, bound book, pen furiously in hand. Abruptly, he flips to the next page, and pauses. For a moment, the sudden movement gives way to unnecessary stillness. He reaches up to dampen the tip of a finger on the tip of his tongue and frees it from its companions, whatever relationship they had shared in their genesis to this point about to be severed, changed forever. With a flourish and unnecessary determined enthusiasm he has not felt in some time, Malcolm rips the single, clasped page from its binding, leaving a jagged margin in its wake. Tossing the little book shut, he turns the same intense focus toward the little page and begins writing something different on it: 

_Dear Dr. Grant,_

_Alan. Is it alright if I call you 'dear'? I'm not sure you ever really liked me enough for that._

_I am writing this to you in the middle of taking down some notes about what happened to us. I don't know if it has become a hobby of mine, or a compulsion, or if it's a task that is actually worth anything. I guess time will tell. I've been thinking about time, and the sheer immensity of it. I have noticed, writing about Isla Nublar, that I think about that first day a lot. I think about the food and wonder how it all tasted like the beginning of something. I knew, and you knew. All three of us knew. I guess I wish I had done more to make my position clear, and not just for my sake, but for yours, and for Ellie's, and even for Gennaro..._

When he has lost himself and waning sunlight to the little page, writing until there is scarcely room for his name with none of the usual flare, he signs this little  _note_ turned something beyond itself and squints through the darkness that has overtaken the room that has a leathery finish on the best of days. He glances to the door, to the scattered papers across his desk, and to his own careful, increasingly smaller handwriting. The laughter bubbles up all at once. He reached up, fingers running through hair that no one will see in daylight until tomorrow. 

“Where in the world are you, Dr. Grant? I can't even send you a letter.” Then, in a moment's longer consideration of it, he finds a way to carefully fold the piece of paper until it feels as strong and compact as it will ever be. He feels undignified, as if there was something of Dr. Grant's wilting, unimpressed gaze in the room with him. He remembers it with startling clarity, and that's something. Cut down in his own mental mirror, he chuckles to himself and strikes a mental pose, leaning back in his chair to murmur to himself. “Now that is chaos.” 

*** 

The note survives laundry, forgetfulness, moving, arguments he loses his place in, and all sorts of things that shame him and that would have shamed other people. The note finds its way into his jacket pocket the night he knows he might see Dr. Grant again, for the first time since parting ways. He finds that it's one of the only reasons he keeps the invitation to go to a place where he knows there are bound to be questions that make old scars feel like raw nerves.

He starts to think that the conference isn't such a bad idea after all when, by the long table of free food mostly being huddled around by undergraduates, he sees a familiar silhouette. He feels as if he would have known them anywhere by now, in any kind of clothes. He has seen them in his mind's eye for longer than he had ever spent with them. It was amazing, really, how much a few days could take up more than a year. 

“H-ey,” he says as he walks up to Dr. Sattler, stretching the greeting into a few unnecessary syllables, all the way until she turns to look at him. Her eyes light up when she sees him, and her posture changes with that relief that everyone knew at these things – the relief of running into someone you knew and feeling a little less like you had wasted your time and every moment of your life that had led you to being here on a university campus on a Friday night. 

“Malcolm,” she says, with a warmer smile than he expects. She gives him a quick glance up and down, but it isn't lingering enough to give him a whole lot of hope or kindling for his ego. If he's to guess, he imagines that she is just glad to see him standing easily again. Then, something else unexpected happens – she draws him into an embrace, a little awkward but earnest and the moment she manages to enclose it, she knows how to make it feel like a natural course of events. Not that he would have objected to it, even she hadn't. 

The contact only lasts for as long as is decent, though – polite and pretty normal, he must suppose. Then, there is an uneasy stretch of silence during which he looks around her at the level of her shoulders, behind her, and then behind himself. He wonders why she hasn't filled the silence when he finally decides to speak up again. 

“Where's Dr. Grant?” he asks, gentle and curious. His hands find his jacket's pockets. 

The moment Ellie's face falls, he knows that he really ought not to have asked that question. His shoulders slump a little, his fingertips brushing a piece of paper in the left-hand pocket that will stay put tonight. 

“Oh, I'm sorry,” he says, earnestly, his hands still in his pockets, his shoulders still slumped, but his eyes trained keenly on her. 

Ellie blinks a few times, clearing her focus of something else. 

“Are you?” she asks, laughing to herself in a way that is obviously not meant for him to join in. 

It is his turn to readjust his vision as he watches her, taken a little aback. 

“Well, I... I—of course I am?” he asks her. He knows that he wasn't supposed to ask a question there, but a lot of things don't happen the way they are _supposed_ to. 

Later, side-by-side, at a long table arranged with privileged, prominent speaking, they share a microphone tuned low but loud enough to make it easier to be heard over undergraduate chatter. Ellie clears her throat to answer a young woman with a book held in her arms, worn and comfortable like an old friend, making her face fall just a little, too, into a polite smile. 

“Dr. Grant couldn't be here tonight. He has returned to his work. I think that all of us should remember that history has not become silent because of anything that is happening now or that may happen in the future.” 

She is poised, elegant in her response and in every response. Malcolm stammers a bit when a question is posed to him from time to time, but he plays it off as he always has. He is taken with her, though, as he always has been. She speaks for herself, confident and present, but every time someone alludes to Alan, or his work, or anything that might belittle it, she is there with a ready, mild, unrelenting defense. No matter what had happened between them, she seems ready to come to intellectual blows with anyone who would question Dr. Grant, his work, or his integrity. It really is amazing, but she never flinches. He knows she can be, was, right in front of him even, but he has always found it hard to imagine her really, truly afraid.

 

* * *

 

He is watching the carousel make its rounds when he clears a distinct  _clucking_ noise that almost makes him flinch. It reminds him of something, as many things do, that he can't really talk about or shout at or do much of anything toward. He hates it, how many things remind him to make sure there is nothing flanking him, that he is not moving when he ought not move, that the smell of rain isn't a portent of death for someone around him. 

“I would know that hat _anywhere_ ,” says the voice that follows the click of the tongue, and then follows the chuckle. The sounds that accompany the words are rehearsed, somehow, and that makes Alan's skin crawl in a less violent way. He starts and looks around, up and down at the black-clad figure he had known he would see. At waist-level, Malcolm is holding a small, folded piece of paper with the name GRANT scrawled across it in big, distinct letters that crisscross other writing. He couldn't even be bothered to pick up a sheet of printer paper to make a sign, if he was going to bother with this performance. Alan sighed. 

“Hello, Malcolm,” he said, tersely, for lack of anything else to say and for lack of a heart to say nothing at all. His mouth formed into something that wasn't a smile, wasn't a snarl, but which was akin to both. 

“Listen, I know we were going to see each other tonight, but Ellie told me when your flight was scheduled to get in, and I have been wanting to give you this for... what, going on two years now,” Malcolm says, speaking a little faster than is necessary but with enough clarity that it cannot help but be taken in. Then, he ducks forward and has transitioned the folded piece of worn, written-on paper between two fingers which he extends to Alan in lieu of a handshake or any other kind of greeting. 

Alan takes it, noticing that the idea that the writing bisecting his name on the paper is  _for him_ , somehow, makes the quality of the whole exchange different. He looks down at the paper, trying to scrutinize it like a find that was completely out of his area of expertise that had ended up in his hand anyway. Meanwhile, Malcolm has taken up standing beside him and leans in to bump his arm against his. Alan finds that he grips the paper more tightly, to protect its behind knocked away in its small, folded form. 

“Hey, what's your bag look like?” Malcolm is asking when Alan's eyes come up. When they do, scanning the carousel, he sees the rugged, worn, vaguely green piece of luggage that had accompanied him many, many places slipping just out of sight around the far curve of the carousel. 

“Damn it!” he exclaims, not sure why it is as infuriating as it is. He could have hopped in place on the floor, only it would have taken too much energy. Instead, he looks over at Malcolm and meets waiting eyes. 

“Maybe I'm your bad-luck charm,” is the only thing Malcolm has to say for himself, smiling a toothy smile that Alan doesn't try to read before studying the carousel again. “We can catch up while we wait,” he suggests. 

“Ellie called you,” Alan found himself echoing. 

“Yeah. She does that. Quite a bit, actually,” Malcolm says. Alan knows it's needling. What he doesn't know is why it's needling in spite of the fact that when his luggage comes around, Malcolm takes it to haul, slight limp and all, before Alan can find the time and words to protest. 

This kind of strange, unbalanced tonality carries with them when Malcolm leads him to a rental car, already waiting. It seems present while Malcolm drives them to his hotel – their hotel, as he finds out. He frowns and bears it, carrying on conversation that is easier than he would think it would be, given the tension and set he can feel in his jaw. It is only when he learns that their rooms are on the same floor, in the same bend of the hallway, when Malcolm has set his luggage in the floor of his room, that Alan can no longer wait to ask. 

“Why are you doing this?” he demands, plaintive in the first, relative privacy they have had. It is almost complete privacy, save for his own standing there, holding the door open still in his hand. 

Malcolm looks at him with an innocent, blinking, genuine, soft expression that he could almost try to pick a fight with. 

“I was glad to see you,” Malcolm says, punctuating each word like its own statement. 

Alan sighs, shaking his head, leaning his temple against his hand as he holds the door. He thinks about it for a few moments, looking down at the carpeted floor, away from Malcolm and at anything for a moment, just to think. 

“I'm sorry,” he says, thinking he more or less means it. “I just... really get the sense that there is something I'm missing here. And you! You with your... air.” 

“My air?” Malcolm asks, apparently finding that word in particular a lot more funny than it would ever have deserved. 

“Yes,” Alan persists, wheeling his gaze back up to his eyes. By this time, he finds that Malcolm has perched himself at the end of Alan's rented bed. He is just sitting there, though, and Alan can't find it in himself to blame him. He glances toward the leg that he knows had taken the brunt of it – more than any physical scar Alan had to deal with. He finds Malcolm's eyes once more before he continues to speak. “The persona you carry around with you. Mystery for mystery's sake. Being vague for being vague's sake. It drives me nuts.” 

“It has had time to drive you nuts?” Malcolm asks. 

“That is exactly what I'm talking about!” 

“I'm not doing anything, really,” Malcolm insists, and Alan genuinely cannot tell if Malcolm knows if he's bullshitting him or not. Malcolm gets himself to his feet and lets himself out the door, nodding for Alan to follow while he lets him continue to hold it. “Come on,” he requests, or insists. “Let me buy you a drink.” 

Alan decides that it's the better part of discretion, politeness, or basic decency not to ask if Ian can actually afford that right now. Or, maybe, he just really needs a drink. 

At the hotel bar, about two drinks in – at least one Alan knows he'll take the tab for – the conversation is a little less stilted. Or maybe it's Alan who is. He is smiling more, and Malcolm is actually good-humored, if nothing else. They are speaking in soft tones, and somehow, it's easier to talk about Isla Nublar with a little bit of a buzz going on an empty stomach. He asks for another when Malcolm suggests it before looking at him with slightly narrowed eyes. 

“If I didn't know better, I'd say you were trying to get me drunk,” he remarks. 

“Oh, come on. Are you a lightweight? I thought you were a cowboy,” Malcolm replies with a sharp grin that only makes Alan a little infuriated by now. Mostly, he smiles and shakes his head. 

“We can't go tonight unless we're sober.” 

“Can't, won't, or maybe we'll be just fine in five hours. That's a long time from now. Anything could happen,” Malcolm says. Alan is busy nodding thanks to the bartender, compulsively, as he takes his third glass into his hand and thinks, briefly, about the luxury of ice. He doesn't consider whether or not anything Malcolm is saying is connected, conspiratorial, or just sly in his usual way, though he hears every word. He clinks glasses with him, casually. “What's that for?” 

Then, Alan realizes he has to come up with something, because it would disappoint Malcolm if he didn't. 

“To... uhm, to... life's unpredictability,” he suggests, thinking that it will please him, if nothing else, when nothing else clear, concise, linear comes to mind. When he looks to see if it worked, he sees the white of Malcolm's teeth, grinning unabashedly but somehow without the usual, feline sharpness. 

“Maybe being ah... a _little_ predictable isn't impossible. Or that bad,” Malcolm says, and he seems to be nostalgic, to be referring to something. Then, he nods toward Alan in a way that makes him sit up a little straighter. “Do you mind reading it? While we're sitting here. Before tonight. I just... really waited a long time to give it to you. And I don't know if it'll change anything, if it matters, but I just... feel like... you oughta read it. I wrote it for you.” 

And Ian seems so heart-set on it, Alan can't think of any alternative but to oblige:

… _There is probably some kind of disciplinary rule that I never try my hand at getting poetic about it, but it's pretty funny how almost dying can make you think a lot about the meaning of human life. About the meaning of your life. I have tried to keep that in mind, going forward, but I don't think I'm doing a very good job yet. I wonder how you're doing, if you did it better than I did. I wonder where you are now, what you ended up doing, and I'd like to keep knowing if you care to let me._

_I think if I ever get the chance, I would like to take on the hubris that ever led us to meeting in the first place. I'd like to confront it and to do something better, something amazing, to show it that what it did to us won't stand or change us. But it did change us, and me wanting to fight anything for your sake is also a form a hubris. Whatever you and Ellie are doing, you handled it better than I did. Wrapping this up, I want to say: I don't know if I will ever again feel the relief I feel, every time I think about it, to know that you are alive. – Malcolm._

 

**Author's Note:**

> I really hope you enjoyed this. It was a last minute treat that got longer than I intended it to, but mostly because I am bad at writing letters and really want to get better at fiction that includes epistolary stuff. I hope that you enjoyed some part of my experimenting with style and topic. The last time I was watching Jurassic Park, I was thinking about how this might have been one of the formative experiences for me liking OT3s long before I ever realized it. I wanted to leave this open-ended, and I'd basically like see how you feel about what it implies in the end -- thedevilchicken or any reader who cares to read it! 
> 
> Thank you for the prompt, thedevilchicken!


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